Monday, May 30, 2016

Bank Holiday is with us again, and I'm feeling sentimental for days of yore when my garden was filled with playthings — and my hosepipe squirted more than an ineffectual dribble.So here's a post from 2009.It's a day that feels like the perfect Bank Holiday Monday, even though it actually wasn't.Ferret Watch

It’s not every day that Son of Whirl
comes running into the study as I’m massaging my pecs with a rolling
pin and cries, ‘Dad! Dad! Come quick! There’s a ferret in the
garden!’

With only swimming goggles, Wellington boots, gardening gloves and a sou wester to protect me, I dashed — nay, was pushed — onto the lawn to “sort it out.”

Maybe I was expecting a stoat, or something weasely-dragony-deadly, with huge fangs, sharp claws and an up-yer-trouser-leg whoosh to rival Graham Norton on a blind date.

What I discovered was that ferrets
are actually quite cute. At least, this one was. It looked like a
miniature albino badger that had been stretched by a couple of
wrestlers, and when I found it rolling around in the fresh compost by
the potting shed, several things were immediately clear:

1) It was cu-uuuute.
2) It had no intention of running away, launching a ferocious attack on anyone or doing anything other than looking cu-uuuute.
3) The sou waster was an overkill.

The RSPCA couldn’t collect it till
this morning, so we got to have a ferret in our greenhouse for the
night, safely tucked away in Geoff’s travelling cat basket.

Did she like this?

She did not.

11 comments:

Ferrets smell rather musky and their piss reeks to high heaven (worse
than Geoff's if she were to eat asparagus, even) but they are hilarious
little clowns. A friend had a pair and they are great pets if you give
them the attention they need. Hopefully this guy's owners will recover
him (her?) soon.

Monday, May 16, 2016

The worst thing about being a creative person is the whole business of trying to get your pup to eat from a plate.

It is in the nature of expansive and combinatorial thinking to spill out and on and over, and in its way, this bounty is harder to deal with than the physiological forlornscape of being stuck.

At least when you’re stuck, you can get started.

You can focus on finding focus, and though it may take a while to find something to lift you from your momentarily paralysing funk, maintaining a singular narrative at this stage is relatively easy (if not immediately enjoyable).

The problem is not that this stuff will run out or dry up or stop coming — unless circumstance or sublime personal folly should become a temporary obstacle — the problem so often is Where does this belong? What is the best use I can make of this shapeshifting morsel my brain just threw out?

This is not to say you cannot generate ideas to order along the lines of Henri Poincaré’s diligent conscious input. All of that is possible, and good thing too. But greenery always flourishes between the tramlines. Always. Like an unyielding spirit that refuses to be controlled or shaped, it exists and mutates as part of an ever transforming cosmos, and though we desperately want more work dogs sometimes — to guard our treasures, herd our sheep and lead the way when we are blind — the more we put down the food, the more the puppies keep on coming, happy just to roll around and lick our faces.

I should maybe throw in a jelly metaphor alongside the emergent foliage and slobbering pooches here, but perhaps jelly is a topic for another post.

Monday, May 9, 2016

History’s greatest ever architectural project may be just around the corner, waiting to dwarf anything mankind has built to date.

But whoever might become responsible for making the magic happen has a whole bunch of imponderables upon which to imponder.

That’s the deal with undertakings on a grand scale.

See, building a wall around Mexico is not the easiest thing to pull off, even when you are at the top of your game.

This wall has a very specific purpose, and when something uncannily similar was pulled down in 1989 with the consent of most everyone on the planet, anyone riding high on a lifetime of successful construction has to figure whether they are about to commit personal and professional suicide.

But hey — this is only PR.

Since when has that ever mattered?

If the Mexicans need keeping apart from all those non-Mexicans of Dutch, English, Italian, Spanish ... (using ellipses and parentheses here to speed things up, and though this may seem like it is turning into a lengthy aside that kinda blows the reason for including it here in the first place, actually, it isn’t) ... and native American descent just down the highway, then a towering fuck off wall simply has to be built.

I’m no expert in economics, but I reckon this whole scheme poses two fundamental questions.

1) Where are all the raw materials going to come from, including the people needed to throw them all together into a purpose-built 2000 mile long wall to exclude greaseball lowlife murderers and rapists (and their friends)?

2) Wouldn’t all those raw materials (including the people) be better deployed on other architectural projects? Like housing and transport and infrastructure?

I can only assume someone better qualified than me has done the maths.

So let’s shoot forward a few years to 2029, when the wall is up, the champagne bottle of completion has been smashed against its triumphal brickwork, and all the Mexicans are now living it up in Alaska.

(That last part was a joke, btw.)

For the construction people, that’s another 15 years of casting their eyes across the pond to see what folks are doing in Europe and Africa, cos like the old adage goes: “Anything cracks off in Europe eventually gonna happen here.”

If they can keep their eyes on the ball while they are piling up the bricks, they can factor in killer features to take account of all eventualities — like how to cope with boats out there in the desert.

Because that’s the big deal right now in Europe: boatloads of people loading up from all over the goddamn shop and traversing vast stretches of cruel ocean to reach freedom’s shore.

Hey, if I were a Mexican, I’d get a head start on the deal and start taking the notion of a dream life in Alaska more seriously.

I’d forget any notion of setting out into the desert with climbing equipment and a bolt cutter (I assume they have mail order in Mexico, so they can probably get hold of this sort of stuff — or, being resourceful types, make it out of cactus), and simply hop into a canoe on one of the two stretches of shoreline close to the Mexican side of the wall before sailing out to the corresponding stretch of shoreline on the US side of the wall.

Should take no longer than ten or fifteen minutes.

Best of all: any boats so used would almost certainly triple in value, even if sold for firewood.

But why am I helping out the Mexicans here?

Isn’t this supposed to be a post questioning the likely problems to be faced by the construction guys building the wall?

Call me stupid, but if they were to let those ignorant Mexicans in on this little secret, they could save themselves a whole lot of time and trouble and money, and maybe protect their reputations along the way.

So maybe PR is the big deal after all.

Bombing the gringoes would be quicker and cheaper than building a wall, that’s for sure.

Better still, the chemical composition of McDonalds coffee is only a few ions away from being the most dangerous poison known to man, and if you could get that into the Mexican water supply, they’d be fucked.

Only problem is, the Mexicans don’t have a great deal of water, which is maybe why they are all running across the border to the US.

Perhaps they’re not murderers and rapists after all; perhaps they’re simply thirsty after eating all that spicy food and want to get their hands on more Dr Pepper.

Monday, May 2, 2016

It’s another Bank Holiday Monday here in the UK — and like the best stuffed chickens prepared by the world’s best chefs, I’m squeezing the sage and onion hard up the nose of this blog post ahead of time.

If the planet is swept away overnight by floods originating in Leicestershire, no one will ever bear witness to my diligence.

In its way, my preparedness is the very least I can muster to convince you that I’m not a master criminal.

So thank me kindly on the way to the abattoir, metaphorical poultry all.

By the time this post slaps onto the internet’s front bottom like a tongue of smoked salmon released by a spinning terrier, we should all know whether or not Leicester City have romped home with the Premiership trophy by crushing a navel-gazy Manchester United with zero display of mercy.

There is a reassuring swagger about the City right now.

Neither cocky nor throbbing with bravado, it’s more the kind of funky, knees-bent experimentation of a recently vasectomised ballet dancer testing his legs for movement in a pair of Oxford bags.

We had Richard III dug up a while back, and now the start-of-the-season’s no-hopers are Ranieri-ing away with it.

It helps also that the City has been positively multicultural and super diverse since before the dawn of time.

You can walk out pretty much anywhere here — apart from in the middle of the road, which is a stupid thing to do anywhere, especially fucking Italy.

Monday, April 25, 2016

As a zen master of the highest order, I’ve taken to scrolling through what passes for motivational bling on my Twitter feed every Monday.

Like the #ff brigade before them, and the #throwbackthursday people 24 hours before that, the #motivationmonday mob now stands poised to flex its inspirational genitalia before our eyes and perform future-creating miracles simply by tugging deftly on any loose skin.

Occasionally, there are gems, but mostly these are verbatim quotes, ripped from the lips of dead sages.

We are parading our laundry right now, occasionally setting chemise against panty and hinting at a whole new spiritual outfit.

But for the most part, no one is saying anything inspiring or incendiary — like “what happens when we’re all super motivated as can be?”